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Giant Ruby Laser Fun

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Hopefully those new fused silica lenses will be able to stand the energy of this laser. A 650nm laser would probably be close enough to get a focal point where the air will break down and cause a midair spark. Once it is Q switched, it will have even more energy in a single pulse.
 





Great job.

Hopefully I will get mine running in the next couple of months. Mine is a toy compared to yours though. I will only be pumping about 1300 Joules into it, At least to start with.

I have some mirrors to play with but I might have to end up getting some made. It's nice to know who made them for you.

Interested to know were you found such a large helical flash tube. I have searched and searched and can't find anything like that. Mine is a Commercial Ruby Head from a Tattoo removal laser and only uses a linear flash tube.


I hope you can find a good focus lense.
 
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paul1598419 said:
I hope the new lenses hold up, at least for a few shots, so you can focus that beam and punch some holes in a stack of razor blades. That book by Koechner is very informative from everything I have heard about it. Not terribly expensive as new text books go, but still not cheap at all.
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There are used copies of that book available for very cheap! I paid under $10 for mine.

ultimatekaiser said:
Yeah this is great stuff. I need to finish mine...man I've been lazy. keep us updated on what you do with this massive beast!
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Will do! It still isn't finished in my mind...I'd like to build a much better pumping chamber for it that doesn't need ~10 minutes to cool off per shot.


paul1598419 said:
Hopefully those new fused silica lenses will be able to stand the energy of this laser. A 650nm laser would probably be close enough to get a focal point where the air will break down and cause a midair spark. Once it is Q switched, it will have even more energy in a single pulse.
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Actually the Q-switch would decrease the energy per shot, but dramatically increase the peak power. Extrapolating from some charts in Solid State Laser Engineering, my current output energy should be ~100J. A Q-switch may drop it to say 25J, but that would be in a ~10ns pulse bringing the peak power to the gigawatts. :D And I think these fused silica lenses will hold up, the lenses that I used earlier were crappy ol' glass.


Mosc007 said:
Great job.

Hopefully I will get mine running in the next couple of months. Mine is a toy compared to yours though. I will only be pumping about 1300 Joules into it, At least to start with.

I have some mirrors to play with but I might have to end up getting some made. It's nice to know who made them for you.

Interested to know were you found such a large helical flash tube. I have searched and searched and can't find anything like that. Mine is a Commercial Ruby Head from a Tattoo removal laser and only uses a linear flash tube.


I hope you can find a good focus lense.
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That helical tube was a find of literally 2 years of careful searching on ebay. Earlier this year a seller listed a ton of giant helical lamps and I was able to grab one. I have some nice linear lamps too but I couldn't get them to trigger in my setup.
 
My usual source for books is Amazon, and these go for $150.00 used for the 1999 copy of Walter Koechner's Solid State Laser Engineering. If you could PM me a link to a cheaper and maybe even later version, I would greatly appreciate it. I went on a long search for this book a couple years ago with nothing close to under $100.00.
 
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The Q switch is indeed a trade off giving you less total energy per shot but concentrating that power into a very very short pulse, which would be good for air breakdown experiments and such.

I'm not really sure how it will affect the rest of your optics though, it may not even be that bad: Something like a focusing lens cracks because it heats up rapidly, but i doubt it would make much of a difference if that 'rapidly' means in 'in a microsecond' or 'in a nanosecond' since neither allow enough time for the heat to dissipate at all.

Things like cavity mirrors don't seem to suffer from q switching much, so i'd presume optics further down the line will not either, despite the enourmous increase in peak power.
 
paul1598419 said:
My usual source for books is Amazon, and these go for $150.00 used for the 1999 copy of Walter Koechner's Solid State Laser Engineering. If you could PM me a link to a cheaper and maybe even later version, I would greatly appreciate it. I went on a long search for this book a couple years ago with nothing close to under $100.00.
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Me too, I'm not online much except to give reps once a day, if you or someone finds this cheap snd there is another one for me, please PM.
 
I really want a hardcover copy of this book badly. I might have to pay the $150.00 price if I can't find a decent copy cheaper somewhere. But, I'd hate to do it knowing there are cheaper copies out there somewhere.

The newest edition of this book goes for $350.00. I have paid nearly that much for text books new before, but that would now be a record for me.
 
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Atomicrox said:
I'm curious, what exactly is in the book to make it that expensive?
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Over 700 pages containing just about everything you'd ever need to know about solid-state laser engineering.

These types of books are always expensive.
 
styropyro said:
This is the same copy I have, for $8. Yeah it's from 1976 but it's all relevant.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Solid-Stat...id=2137676&hash=item3f6f055016:i:272445558806


These are from 1992, don't know what was changed from the 1976 version
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Solid-Stat...id=1459489&hash=item33d9e7f604:i:222699189764

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Solid-Stat...id=1459489&hash=item5451ae7a46:i:362147641926
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I have an electronic version of the 6th edition if anyone wants it... Much newer than 1992, I've seen different dates but at the earliest this version is from 2006.
 
The text by Walter Koechner can be 1700 pages from what I've seen. There are several different versions of this.

Thanks, styropyro. I ordered the newer version of the book you have. It was cheaper too.
 
diachi said:
Over 700 pages containing just about everything you'd ever need to know about solid-state laser engineering.

These types of books are always expensive.
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These books are usually also expensive because they are produced in relatively small numbers. 700 or even 1700 pages doesn't make a book $300, you can easily buy 1700 pages worth of popular books (novels etc) for $50 or so.

For non-academic use you can often find outdated versions of textbooks for very low prices as universities require students to have the most recent version (otherwise page number references will be off and such, total scam).

If you just want the information to study for yourself but are not attending a college i'd always recommend getting the previous version: there is usually little new information in fundamental science books published 5 or 10 years apart. They just do that to prevent the second hand market for students.

I guess by 1992 most information on solid state lasers you can construct yourself was well documented so the text should be fine. This would be an entirely different story for diode lasers where information from 2015 is already outdated ;)
 
It is a scam as I was looking today at the most up to date edition of Solid State Laser Engineering, by Walter Koechner and they wanted about $500.00 for it. I remember paying about $240.00 for my Organic Chemistry text. It was replaced the next year with a totally different book. I still have the text. It could probably be had for $20.00 today on the used book market. But, the reactions in this text are still relevant today. In fact, I doubt there are any new reactions in a 2018 edition of an organic chemistry text.
 
paul1598419 said:
It is a scam as I was looking today at the most up to date edition of Solid State Laser Engineering, by Walter Koechner and they wanted about $500.00 for it. I remember paying about $240.00 for my Organic Chemistry text. It was replaced the next year with a totally different book. I still have the text. It could probably be had for $20.00 today on the used book market. But, the reactions in this text are still relevant today. In fact, I doubt there are any new reactions in a 2018 edition of an organic chemistry text.
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I don't know what version but I bought that book recently for $15 on Ebay. A member here sent me the link.

After I bought it I was shocked to see it for hundreds of dollars.
 
Mosc007 said:
I don't know what version but I bought that book recently for $15 on Ebay. A member here sent me the link.

After I bought it I was shocked to see it for hundreds of dollars.
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If you ever get another link like that again, I'd greatly appreciate it if you would send me a PM with it. I am considering paying big bucks for an old copy of this book. :thanks:
 
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